Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) James Morton - Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy-Oxford Univ Pr (2021).
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Acknowledgements
This book started life as my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, which I began in 2013. The journey from there to here has been a long one and would not have been possible without the valuable help of many individuals and institutions. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Maria Mavroudi, my Ph.D. adviser and long-time mentor in Byzantine Studies. She was the one who first alerted me to the potential of canon law as a research subject and inspired my fascination with medieval manuscript culture. Maria has been as unfailing in her support for me as she has been exacting in her expectations, for which I owe her a great debt.
I am also extremely grateful to Maureen Miller, my second-field Ph.D. adviser who shaped my education in the history and canon law of Western Christendom. She is in large part responsible for extending my intellectual horizons beyond Byzantium to the wider medieval world and remains an important mentor to me. Outside Berkeley, I would like to thank the former directors of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Alice-Mary Talbot and Elena Boeck, for their invaluable advice and encouragement in recent years, and my M.A. adviser Richard Greenfield of Queen’s University (Canada).
My research involved a great deal of travel and expense, and so I am deeply indebted to the organisations that have supported me along the way. The main funding for my research was provided by the History Department of U. C. Berkeley, with important support also coming from the U.C. Berkeley Graduate Division, the U.C. Berkeley Institute of International Studies, the British School at Rome, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame. I would also like to thank the Senior Fellows of Dumbarton Oaks for giving me the opportunity to spend a year in residence as a Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies while writing my Ph.D. dissertation. Among them, I would especially like to mention the late Ruth Macrides, a kind and brilliant scholar who is sorely missed.
Several organisations also provided vital assistance in non-financial respects. I am extremely grateful to the many libraries that opened their doors to me and helped me access important materials: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Badia greca di Grottaferrata, the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the Biblioteca Nazionale ‘Vittorio Emmanuele IIP in Naples, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Moscow State Historical Museum, the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Dominican House of Studies in Washington D. C., and the U.S. Library of Congress. Special thanks also go to Fr Germanos of Vatopedi on Mount Athos for allowing me to view the monastery’s manuscript collection and to the monk whose quick thinking ensured that I managed to catch the boat off the mountain in time.
On a more personal note, I must thank my father Andrew, my stepmother Marjorie, my brother Peter, and all the members of my family who have helped and encouraged me through this long process. Thanks go also to my old friend Thomas Coward, who has always been ready to listen to my ideas, critique my writing, and treat me to some of his excellent cooking. I am especially grateful to my loving partner Ashley for her support, both moral and practical. She knows better than anyone how long a process this has been, not only as I worked on this book but also as I navigated the difficult transition from postgraduate student to early career academic. I could not have done this without her love and encouragement.
Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank the anonymous readers of Oxford University Press who provided insightful advice and criticism that improved this book immensely. I alone am responsible for any flaws that remain.
Note on Translation and Transliteration
One of my main aims in this book is to make a very inaccessible body of sources more accessible, not just to specialists but also to readers from other scholarly fields or even interested members of the general public. Consequently, I try to minimise the amount of Latin and Greek in the main body of the page while still providing source texts in the original language in footnotes. For quotations from modern scholarly works in languages other than English, I have taken the liberty of providing translations without including the original text. All translations are my own unless stated otherwise.
Transliteration of Greek and Arabic proper nouns is a point of perennial contention. I am no expert in the latter language, so I have simply followed the conventions that I have seen used by scholars who are. As for Greek, my approach is to strike a balance between authenticity, clarity, and aesthetics. I follow the standard of the Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, transliterating Greek names into Hellenised English spelling (e.g. “Alexios’ instead of “Alexius’). Where a name is already widely used in an Anglicised form, however, I prefer to use that spelling so as not to unduly burden the reader (e.g. ‘Constantinople’ instead of ‘Konstantinoupolis’ or ‘Basil’ instead of ‘Basileios’
Introduction
The last Byzantine metropolitan bishop of Reggio in Calabria passed away in the year 1079. The city had been captured by the Norman leader Robert Guiscard nearly twenty years earlier, but most of its population was Greek, a result of several centuries of continuous Byzantine rule since Late Antiquity. The then-patriarch of Constantinople, Kosmas I (1075-1081), appointed a Byzantine monk named Basil as the new metropolitan of Reggio and dispatched him to take up his see. This was a bold move, since the Norman conquest of Calabria in the 1050s—1060s meant that it was now under the effective jurisdiction of the Roman papacy. Unsurprisingly, the hostile Normans prevented Basil from ever reaching Reggio and instead installed one of their own people, Arnulf.’
We do not know what happened to Basil over the next decade, but he appears in the sources again in the year 1089. The Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118) and Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) were both seeking rapprochement between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople after several decades of hostility stemming from the Norman conquests. Basil was once again sent to Italy, this time to discuss the subject of church union with the pope. Together with the Greek archbishop Romanos of Rossano (another Greek city in Calabria), he met the pope at Melfi in November 1089 to represent the Byzantine church.
However, Basil had not yet come to terms with losing the metropolis of Reggio ten years earlier. It so happened that the see had fallen vacant again after Arnulf’s death. Basil remonstrated with the pope over the injustice that the Normans had denied him his see after he was canonically consecrated by the patriarch of Constantinople. Urban replied that it was he, not the patriarch, who had the rightful jurisdiction over southern Italy, but nonetheless offered to appoint Basil as metropolitan on one condition: ‘Submit yourself to me and you will receive your church.” Basil could have Reggio as long as he accepted the pope, not the patriarch, as his rightful primate. He refused.
Basil’s experience offers a revealing glimpse into the relations between Latin and Greek Christians in the late eleventh century. The old received wisdom on the subject, still often repeated in non-specialist publications, was that Rome and Constantinople entered into schism in 1054 when Cardinal Humbert of SilvaCandida excommunicated Patriarch Michael Keroularios (r. 1043-1059) over the latter’s stubborn refusal to accept the Filioque in the Creed and unleavened bread in the Eucharist.? The encounter between Basil and Urban at Melfi provides ample demonstration of the deficiencies of this narrative: not only did the pope show no awareness of a schism between Latins and Greeks, but he did not even mention theological or liturgical differences like the Filioque. The only issue that he stresses is authority: Basil must accept that southern Italy falls under the pope’s canonical jurisdiction.
Most Greek Christians in Italy did accept papal authority as the price of continuing unharassed in their ancestral rites. Yet Basil’s story points us towards an intriguing contradiction. If the Greeks of southern Italy were supposed to accept Roman jurisdiction, it surely follows that they should also have accepted Roman canon law and Roman justice. However, it is far from clear that they did. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence that Italo-Greeks continued to follow Byzantine church law for more than a century after Basil’s exchange with Urban II at Melfi.
This book offers the first historical study of a significant part of that evidence: a group of thirty-six surviving manuscripts (or manuscript fragments) of Byzantine canon law, known as ‘nomocanons’, that were produced and used by the ItaloGreeks between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries.* These manuscripts were legal reference works that offered a guide to the legislation and judicial procedure of the Byzantine church; they have nothing whatsoever to say on the canon law of the Roman church in the medieval period.
How could the Greek Christians of southern Italy disregard the canon law of their Latin conquerors and persist in using nomocanons for such a long time? What does it imply about the nature of law and religion in medieval southern Italy that they were able to do so? To be more specific, what does the continued use of Byzantine canon law in the centuries after the Norman conquest say about the nature of the submission that Urban II required of Basil in return for the metropolis of Reggio in 1089?
Specialists in the fields of Byzantine legal history and codicology are aware of these manuscripts and some have been the subject of previous academic research. Nonetheless, there has to date been no attempt to conduct a broader study of the Italo-Greek nomocanons and they are not well known among non-specialists. This book has three main aims, therefore: to introduce readers to the manuscripts and their contents; to explain how and why they continued to be produced under Latin rule; and to consider what they reveal about the legal and cultural pluralism of medieval southern Italy. In pursuing these aims, it will show how these manuscripts should be of interest not only to medievalists and Byzantinists, but to any scholar who is interested in the intersection of law, religion, and cultural identity.
My approach to the subject has been strongly influenced by the field of legal anthropology (particularly the popular concept of legal pluralism) and by the methodological perspective of material philology. In this introductory chapter, I shall explain these foundational concepts and show how they provide a useful key to understanding the Italo-Greek nomocanons. I shall also address difficult theoretical and terminological issues surrounding the notion of culture and identity, which play a large role in this study, and finish with an overview of the contents of the book’s chapters.
Byzantine Canon Law and Legal Pluralism
Legal history has long been a niche subject within Byzantine Studies; Byzantine canon law is, if anything, a niche within a niche. This is to some extent a consequence of law’s reputation as a highly specialised subject, but it is also a product of the traditional interests of the field. Since the nineteenth century, Byzantine legal historians have mainly concerned themselves with Quellenkritik, the production of critical editions of legal source texts.* This is undeniably a vital and necessary task (the present book would have been impossible without it), but one effect of such a strong concentration on editing normative texts is that has created a perception of the subject as abstract and divorced from historical context. When Byzantinists have discussed canon law texts, they have often used them as supplementary texts in broader historiographical debates on topics such as Byzantine ‘caesaropapism’ (i.e. the role of the emperor in the administration of the church).° Indeed, it says a lot about the state of the field that the only overview of the history of Byzantine canon law since the 1980s (and the only one at all in English) came in a volume edited by two scholars of medieval Western canon law.’
Nonetheless, the state of Byzantine legal scholarship has begun to change gradually since the 1980s and more rapidly in the past decade.* In 2011, the French legal scholar Lisa Bénou published an important monograph on Byzantine legal practice during the Palaiologan era (1261-1453).? She examined the relationship between law ‘in the books’ and law as it was practised in reality, aelationship that she referred to as Byzantine ‘legalité (a difficult term to translate into English).’°
The years since Bénou’s monograph have seen a surprising upsurge in innovative studies of how Byzantine law worked in its own historical context. Michael Humphreys has explored the role of lawgiving in shaping political ideology in the period c. 680-850 and Zachary Chitwood has explored the legal culture (broadly defined) of Byzantium under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056).'’ Even Byzantine church law has received some attention with David Wagschal’s excellent study of the formation of the canonical corpus in the early Middle Ages, which aims to explain ‘how Byzantine canon law was supposed to work.’?
These recent works have all (to a greater or lesser extent) been influenced by important developments in twentieth-century critical legal theory and reflect a welcome trend towards interdisciplinarity in Medieval and Byzantine Studies. One of the most significant developments in legal theory, and one that is central to this study, is the idea of legal pluralism.’* The modern concept of legal pluralism emerged in the 1970s as a reaction to the legal positivism that prevailed for much of the twentieth century.’* Legal positivism is most famously associated with the work of H.L.A. Hart, who adopted an empirical approach to the law, viewing it as a closed intellectual system produced by an authoritative legislative body (such as the state).’* Hart conceived the idea of a ‘rule of recognition’, a basic test to determine whether or not a set of normative rules can be classed as ‘law’."® In contrast to Hart’s empiricism, legal pluralists contend that law is not just the codified rules promulgated and enforced by sovereign lawgivers, but the diverse array of behavioural norms followed by different communities in different social contexts. In the pluralistic conception of law, multiple ‘legal systems’ can and do coexist within a society to varying degrees of formalism.’” Take, for example, the voluntary codes of conduct often adopted by modern universities, businesses, and professional bodies. These are not backed by the coercive power of the state, yet they still set appropriate bounds for behaviour and can carry penalties of varying severity for those who violate them. They are not statute law in the technical sense,but they are still methods by which communities regulate and adjudicate social interaction; in that sense, they are examples of what Locchi has called ‘law as a social institution’.”*
Medieval Europe was characterised by a diverse pluralism of formal and informal legal orders. Roman civil law existed alongside canon law, mercantile law, local city laws, ethnic laws, and so forth. Historians have also observed similarly pluralistic legal cultures in other pre-modern societies such as the Roman Empire and Fatimid Egypt.’’ Southern Italy was one of the most legally plural societies of the Mediterranean world, home to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, each following their own religious laws, while Christians were subdivided again into Greeks, Normans, Lombards, and even Slavs.
That there was legal diversity in medieval southern Italy is not in itself a new insight. What is interesting, however, is the way in which these more formalistic legal orders related to the region’s social, cultural, and religious orders. The relationship between law and culture was eloquently expressed by the American jurist Robert Cover, whose influential article ‘Nomos and Narrative’ strongly informs this book’s main argument.”° The article discusses the concept of ‘jurisgenesis’, the process by which a society generates legal meaning. Jurisgenesis is not simply the creation of laws but a continuous social process: “We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void.” The creation of legal meaning is the creation of a common legal narrative, an ongoing discourse in which a community determines the character of its normative world (the ‘nomos’ of Cover’s title).
Cover argued that jurisgenesis takes place ‘through an essentially cultural medium’ and identified two ideal-typical modes: the ‘paideic’ and the ‘imperial’.”” In the paideic mode, a community or social group develops a set of shared behavioural norms based on a common body of precept or narrative. In the imperial mode, fixed institutions (such as the state) establish and enforce a set of formal, universal laws. No legal culture is ever wholly paideic or imperial; rather, the law is a spectrum encapsulating both modes of jurisgenesis. Moreover, the process is continuous and a community’s normative world can shift from one end of the spectrum to the other.
Together, legal pluralism and Cover’s paideic-imperial model of jurisgenesis offer a compelling lens for the study of the Italo-Greek nomocanons. Canon law clearly embodies elements of both imperial and paideic jurisgenesis. It regulates some matters that we would traditionally associate with statute law such as divorceand inheritance, but it also regulates purely social customs such as the type of food a person may eat and when. Moreover, it emerged from the (paideic) practices of the Christian communities of the early centuries of the first millennium and developed into the (imperial) codification of the modern Catholic Code of Canon Law.
Law, Religion, and Culture
If a community’s legal order is founded on a shared narrative, as Cover expressed it, then it follows that law must be inextricably bound to culture. ‘Culture’ is a notoriously difficult concept to define and discussions of cultural change and interactions are minefields fraught with theoretical dangers. When I refer to ‘culture’, I mean the common customs, social norms, and forms of expression that define a community of people. By defining a community, culture also provides the framework for a sense of identity (another fraught concept). The definitional action of culture is relational, since humans tend to base their identity on practices that make them different from others rather than what they have in common. People usually belong to multiple types of community (e.g. Christian, Greek, Calabrian, monastic, etc.) at the same time, giving them multiple layers of identity and cultural practice.
The southern Italian ‘melting pot’ has proved to be an excellent laboratory for scholars who wish to investigate historical identity and culture. Annick PetersCustot, for example, conducted a highly detailed study of what she called the ‘gentle acculturation’ of the Italo-Greeks under Latin rule, while Linda Safran has examined how the art of the medieval Salento expressed the identities of its various inhabitants.** There is also fine work by researchers such as Jeremy Johns and Alex Metcalfe on Arabic and Islamic culture in Norman Italy.” Several scholars (including Peters-Custot and Safran) have made efforts to theorise cultural identity in medieval southern Italy, debating concepts such as ‘acculturation’, ‘interculturation’, ‘hybridity’, ‘syncretism’, ‘transculturation’, and ‘third space’ theory.”° All these approaches attempt to grapple in their own way with the question of how cultural groups interact with and influence one another.
A detailed exploration of theoretical perspectives on culture and identity is beyond the scope of this book. I should emphasise, though, that I do not treat these concepts as intrinsic or immutable characteristics. Nor do I subscribe to what Peter Brown termed ‘cultural hydraulics’, the assumption that culture ‘flows’ from one reservoir (e.g. the Latin world) to another (e.g. the Greek world) throughthe metaphorical sluice-gates of history.” Cultural change does not entail abandoning one identity and replacing it with another; rather, it entails different communities adopting and adapting each other’s practices in such a way that their identities may begin to seem less different.
That said, one must make terminological choices when writing about historical identities and I do not expect that every reader will agree with mine. I have attempted to achieve a compromise between authenticity and clarity, between terms that are used in the medieval sources and ones that will be easily understood by modern English-speakers. One of the most obvious compromises is my use of the word ‘Byzantine’, a word that Byzantine authors themselves used exceedingly rarely (they called themselves ‘Romans’) but has become so common in modern usage as to be indispensable.”*
One of my more controversial choices, at least for Anglophone scholars, is my frequent use of terms like ‘Latins’, ‘Greeks’, and ‘Italo-Greeks’. One could justifiably argue that these are too vague; a medieval ‘Latin’, for instance, could hail from almost any Christian region of Western Europe. As for the term ‘Greek’, this could refer to an inhabitant of the geographical region of the modern nation state of Greece or any Greek speaker from the eastern Mediterranean. The way in which Byzantine authors used the word ‘Hellene’ (the more authentic term for ‘Greek’) itself changed greatly over the centuries, as Antony Kaldellis has explained.” Again, the meaning changes depending on the context.
This book’s primary focus is on southern Italy between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries. In this context, the terms ‘Latin’ and ‘Greek’ are not as vague or anachronistic as they might otherwise seem; they are the actual words used by medieval southern Italian authors (in both Latin and Greek texts) to distinguish between Christians of the Roman and the Byzantine rites in the region. Indeed, some southern Italian Greek writers even adopted the Latin term ‘graec?’ as ‘graikoi to describe themselves, as we shall see later in the book. I have therefore chosen to use these terms as they seemed to be the most useful in the context of this book and allow me to avoid tiresome circumlocutions.** One anachronistic term that I have adopted is ‘Italo-Greek’, a commonplace of French and Italian scholarship, since it is useful for distinguishing between the Greeks of southern Italy and those of the mainland Byzantine Empire.
I have likewise chosen to use the expressions ‘Latin Christian’ and ‘Greek Christian’ to refer to the two groups’ religious communities. The terms ‘Catholic’and ‘Orthodox’ to my mind carry too much anachronistic baggage, implying to modern readers the existence of separate Christian denominations (a pluralistic concept that would have been unfamiliar in the Middle Ages). Despite cultural and religious differences, most medieval Christians would not have viewed the churches of Rome and Constantinople as separate communions, at least until the Fourth Crusade of 1204.*” Even after the Fourth Crusade, some Byzantine churchmen such as the famous canonist Demetrios Chomatenos (d. 1236) still felt that it was acceptable for Greeks and Latins to commune with one another as long as the Eucharistic bread was leavened.** The key distinction for medieval southern Italians lay not between denominations in the modern sense but between languages, liturgies, and associated customs; ‘Latins’ spoke Latin in church and ‘Greeks’ spoke Greek.
I began this introduction by posing the question of why the Italo-Greeks continued to produce and read nomocanons for so many years after they had been compelled to accept the authority and jurisdiction of the Roman church. The central contention of this book is that legal pluralism provides the best means of answering the question. On one level, Byzantine canon law can be seen as just another of southern Italy’s many coexisting legal systems, operating alongside various other types of ethnic, religious, and institutional law. More profound, however, is the connection between Byzantine canon law and the cultural and religious identity of the Italo-Greeks. The nomocanons were not just authoritative sources for the legal system of an institutional church; they were authoritative sources for the religious practices of a distinct community in southern Italy. As such, they could remain culturally relevant even when they had lost their formal legal utility.
Sources and Methodology
Of the thirty-six manuscripts that form the basis of this study, twenty-six are either nomocanons in the strict sense of the word (mixed collections of canon and civil law) or straightforward canon law collections (see Table 0.1). The other ten manuscripts are ‘nomocanonical’; while they technically comprise different types of manuscript (collections of civil law, Gospel readings, patristic texts, etc.), they have enough canon-law content to justify their inclusion in this study.
When compiling my list of primary sources, I took as my starting point the excellent three-volume Repertorium der Handschriften des byzantinischen Rechts published in Dieter Simon’s Forschungen zur byzantinischen Rechtsgeschichte list of sources. Besides correcting a small number of misattributions and cases of incorrect dating, I was able to localise several new manuscripts to southern Italy from their known history and physical characteristics. Although I have attempted to make as comprehensive a list of manuscript sources as possible, it cannot be exhaustive: new nomocanonical manuscripts could always be discovered in the future. Furthermore, there are several cases of known manuscripts of uncertain provenance that have been or could be attributed to southern Italy.** Nonetheless, the body of sources that I studied for this project is large enough to allow for meaningful conclusions and generalisations.
My first task in examining the manuscripts was to compile a database of important information on provenance, ownership history, contents, and physical characteristics; the results of this can be found in Appendix 1. Though many of the manuscripts’ contents are already detailed in the RHBR, some have never been catalogued before; in other cases, it was necessary to correct or expand the descriptions in existing catalogues.
The purpose was partly to make the information more accessible to readers, but also to convey the materiality of the manuscripts. Manuscripts are not just sources for the edited texts that we read in print and online today; they are physical witnesses to the social and cultural contexts in which those texts were copied and read in the past. Was a manuscript created more for practical use or for show? Did it require a large investment of money or resources? Did its owners take good care of it? Was it used for a short or a long period of time?
By studying nomocanonical manuscripts as historical evidence in themselves, we gain glimpses into how medieval readers encountered their legal tradition. This is the approach advocated by proponents of ‘material’ (or ‘new’) philology, a school that originated in French post-structuralism and gained popularity among Anglophone medievalists in the 1990s.*° Material philologists seek to historicise manuscripts by treating them as artefacts in and of themselves; in this way, they become evidence not only for texts but also for the society that read them.
As I studied the manuscripts, I attempted to corroborate (or discover for the first time) details of each one’s provenance, date, and copyist/s. Very few of the codices retain their scribal colophons; these were typically inscribed in a manuscript’s final quires, which are the most likely to suffer damage or be lost. As a result, one must take note of a range of factors. By cross-referencing observable patterns in production and style with evidence for how and where the manuscripts were historically preserved (e.g. through medieval and Renaissance inventories, notes of sale, etc.), it was possible in most cases to assign them to particular regions of southern Italy and to particular centuries. In some cases, most notably
the monastic nomocanons of twelfth-century Calabria, it was surprising to see just how specific one could be.
I next sought to place the manuscripts in their historical context by investigating related documentary and narrative sources: papal bulls, charters of the rulers and nobles of the Kingdom of Sicily, the surviving archives of Italo-Greek monasteries, and similar materials. These texts provide extremely useful information on the manuscripts’ general context and sometimes have direct bearing on specific nomocanons. There is also a large quantity of surviving letters and treatises by Byzantine and Italo-Greek authors on the subject of canon law, many of whom used nomocanonical manuscripts as direct or indirect sources. This combination of approaches—material study of the primary source manuscripts together with historical contextualisation—serves as the main basis for the analysis in this book.
Overview of Chapters
The book is divided into ten chapters grouped into three parts. Part I sets the scene by introducing the book’s main source material and the context in which it was produced and preserved. Parts II and III present the two main historical phases in which the surviving Italo-Greek nomocanons were created; the former focuses on the last century of Byzantine rule and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily (the tenth to twelfth centuries), while the latter looks at important changes that occurred in the post-Norman period (the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries).
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the Byzantine nomocanon, explaining its historical development, typical contents and layout, and principle codicological and palaeographical character. Chapter 2 then gives a narrative overview of Greek Christianity in medieval southern Italy to provide basic historical context for the rest of the book. Part I concludes with Chapter 3, on the nomocanons’ history of source survival in the medieval period, showing why we have what we have and discussing what might have been lost.
Chapter 4 discusses the evidence for canon law in Byzantine southern Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It shows that the main trends in manuscript production were established in the decades following the Byzantine reconquest and administrative reorganisation of the region in the late ninth century, with the result that the southern Italian nomocanons appear relatively archaic by comparison to surviving examples from the Byzantine mainland.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine monastic nomocanons from the Norman period, which form the largest surviving sample of manuscripts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Chapter 5 presents the evidence for the contexts in which the monastic nomocanons were copied, arguing that the Norman rulers consciously allowed independent Italo-Greek monasteries within their realm to administer their own internal legal affairs, with the nomocanons serving as practical reference
aids. Chapter 6 then studies the content and codicological style of the monastic nomocanons, noting three broad categories: the practical, almost austere manuscripts of smaller independent monasteries of Calabria and Lucania; the impressive, highly decorative manuscripts of the wealthy monasteries of Rossano and Messina; and the manuscripts of St Nicholas of Casole, which seem to have a more didactic purpose and show a stronger connection with twelfth-century Constantinople. Chapter 7 completes Part II by considering nomocanons used by the Greek secular church and the laity, noting that at least some Italo-Greek bishops and even lay judges observed Byzantine canon law in their administration of justice under Norman rule.
Chapter 8 begins Part III of the book by exploring the effect on Italo-Greek religious law of the demise of the Norman dynasty in the 1190s and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. These events created an opportunity for the Roman papacy to become more actively involved in the administration of justice in the Kingdom of Sicily and provided the means to integrate the Italo-Greeks more closely into the Roman church’s legal system.
Chapter 9 focuses on a selection of nomocanons from the Salento peninsula (produced between the late twelfth and early fourteenth centuries) that were mostly copied by and for the region’s secular Greek priests. Observing the manuscripts’ strong focus on subjects such as clerical marriage, liturgical practices, and the validity of the Byzantine baptismal rite, it argues that Salentine Greek priests resorted to nomocanons as sources of cultural authority that could help explain and legitimise their distinctive Greek Christian practices to critical Latin neighbours.
Finally, Chapter 10 analyses the changing role of Byzantine canon law in thirteenth-century southern Italy more broadly. It considers examples such as Nektarios of Otranto’s Three Chapters and the baptismal controversy of 1232 to argue that canon law had become a tool to define and preserve the identity of the Italo-Greek Christian community against the pressures of demographic change and cultural assimilation. Following the conclusion, the book closes with a series of appendices that provide formal descriptions of the codices, an overview of the key statistics on the manuscript sources, and brief discussions of further manuscripts that may or may not have southern Italian provenance.
It was originally my hope to include an appendix of illustrations of the primary source manuscripts at the end of the book. Unfortunately, the image licensing practices of many libraries and archives have not kept pace with the demands of modern digital publishing, so this has proved to be impossible in many cases. Instead, I have included links where available to online photo-reproductions of manuscripts or microfilms that will allow readers to view entire manuscripts with relative ease. I have also managed to include some images in the book from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana that are not available online but are useful to help visualise certain topics.
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